On the ground of recent increase of car theft, various types of vehicle alarm systems have been proposed.
For instance, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2000-52932 (published on Feb. 22, 2000) discloses “TIE-UP SYSTEM BETWEEN SECURITY AND EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION SERVICE”. This system is arranged in such a way that an in-vehicle security device (monitoring apparatus) for issuing a warning after sensing the abnormality concerning a vehicle is connected to an emergency communication service device which notifies a response center of an emergency state, so that information can be transmitted between the in-vehicle security device and the emergency communication service device, and the emergency communication service device having received the report of the abnormality from the security device notifies user's mobile phone or pager of the abnormality.
This conventional system, however, has such a problem that, on the occurrence of abnormality of a vehicle, the abnormality is notified to the user's mobile phone and the like via the response center, so that the report is completed only after a certain period of time has past from the occurrence of the abnormality. This is because the system requires a period for connecting the security device with the response center and a period for connecting the response center with the user's mobile phone and the like.
Furthermore, the user notified of the abnormality is normally away from the vehicle, and hence cannot deal with the abnormality by him/herself in most cases. Consequently, the user having been notified of the abnormality from the response center has to further contact the police and the like. The user on this occasion is required to determine a report destination and make a call using a mobile phone. These determination and operation of the mobile phone often take time (e.g. to find out the telephone number of the report destination), thereby causing the report to the police, etc. to be further delayed.
Although reports made through such system are often urgent ones and require prompt action, the conventional system may cause delay as above, so that one cannot swiftly take countermeasures to the abnormality and thus the damage is likely to spread.
Note that, such a problem is conspicuous in vehicle theft monitoring systems, but also occurs in all sorts of monitoring systems.
The present invention was made to solve this problem, and an objective of the present invention is to provide a monitoring system which can make a report to a suitable report destination in a short time, a mobile communication apparatus and monitoring apparatus constituting such a monitoring system, and a monitoring method. The objective of the present invention includes the provision of a monitoring program for realizing the above-mentioned monitoring system, and a computer-readable recording medium storing the monitoring program.